Why Iraq is in turmoil. By Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS, January 11, 2014.
What went wrong in Iraq? Video. Panel with Rashid Khalidi, Richard Haass, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Peter Bergen. Fareed Zakaria GPS, January 10, 2014. Transcript.
Zakaria:
Here’s
a startling statistic: more than 8,000 Iraqis were killed in violent attacks in
2013. That makes it the second most violent country in the world, after its
neighbor Syria.
As
violence has spread and militants have gained ground in several Middle Eastern
countries, people have been wondering how much this has to do with the Obama
administration and its lack of an active intervention in the region. The Wall Street Journal and a Commentary magazine opinion piece have
both argued this past week that the Obama administration's decision to withdraw
troops from Iraq is directly responsible for the renewed violence in that
country. They and others have also argued that because it has stayed out of Syria,
things there have spiraled downward.
Let me
suggest that the single greatest burden for the violence and tensions across
the Arab world lies with a president – though not President Obama – and it lies
with an American foreign policy that was not too passive but rather too active
and interventionist in the Middle East. The invasion and occupation of Iraq
triggered what has become a regional religious war in the Middle East. Let me
explain how, specifically.
From
March through June of 2003, in the first months of the occupation of Iraq, the
Bush administration made a series of catastrophic decisions. It authorized the
disbanding of the Iraqi army and signed onto a policy of deBaathification,
which meant that anyone in Iraq who had been a member of the top four levels of
the Baath Party – the ruling party under Saddam Hussein – would be barred from
holding any government job.
This
meant that tens of thousands of bureaucrats and hundreds of thousands of
soldiers – almost all Sunnis – were thrown out of work, angry, disposed, and
armed. This in turn meant the collapse of the Iraqi state and of political
order. But it also sparked the rise of a sectarian struggle that persists to
this day.
The
Bush administration went to war in Iraq to spread democracy. But in fact it
spread sectarianism – displacing the Sunni elite who had long ruled the country
and replacing it with hardline Shia religious parties that used their new found
power to repress the Sunnis – just as they had been repressed.
Meanwhile,
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been utterly unwilling to share power
with the Sunnis – who comprise about 20 percent of Iraq – and that has driven
them into opposition, extremism, and terrorism. During the surge the prime
minister made several promises to change his ways and over the last few years
has reneged on every one of them.
This
sectarian power-struggle is the origins of the civil war that has been ongoing
in Iraq for 11 years. It is the cancer that has spread beyond Iraq into other
countries, from Syria to Lebanon.
The
Bush administration seemed to have made the massive strategic error almost
unthinkingly. There is for example a report that a few months before the
invasion, President Bush met with three Iraqi exiles and appeared unaware that
Iraq contained within it Sunnis and Shias. An Arab leader confirmed to me that
in his meetings with the president, it was clear that Bush did not understand
that there was a difference between the two sects. Others in the
administration, better informed, were convinced that the Shia would be
pluralists and democrats. Those of us who warned of these dangers at the time
were dismissed as pessimists.
So if
we’re trying to understand why we see a Sunni-Shia battle unfolding across the
Middle East, keep in mind that the primary cause is not that the Obama
administration didn't intervene in Syria. It’s because the Bush administration
did in Iraq.
Panel:
ZAKARIA:
Rashid, when you look at all this turmoil brewing in the Middle East, what do
you see as the cause?
RASHID
KHALIDI, AUTHOR, PROFESSOR OF MODERN ARAB STUDIES, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Well,
there are many causes, but one cause is that you have some sectarian issues
that are working themselves out.
Another
cause is a whole generation or so of American policies that I think exacerbated
things.
A third
cause is American alliances with countries that have their own dogs in some of
these fights, Saudi Arabia, Israel, others.
Each of
these, I think, exacerbates a set of problems.
ZAKARIA:
How do you see it, Richard.
RICHARD
HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: A big part of the cause, it
comes from within Middle East itself. These are societies that have never
really dealt with – successfully with modernity.
You’ve
never had a clear divide between the religious and the secular. People confuse
democracy and majoritarianism. There's not a real sense of minority rights or
places in these societies. So all sorts of divides also between governments and
individuals.
So
those issues have never been sort out. It’s, in some ways, the least successful
part of the world. And, then, in many ways, I agree, American foreign policy
has exacerbated things by removing centers of authority, in many cases,
unattractive, but still . . .
ZAKARIA:
Right.
HAASS:
Centers of authority and not doing things that were needed to put something
better or at least enduring in its place.
So we
say Assad must go, put pressure on him, but then virtually nothing happens to
see that he goes, much less to replace him with something better.
Gadhafi
must go, then what? No boots on the ground.
ZAKARIA:
Right.
HAASS:
I’m not saying we should have done boots on the ground, but before the United
States starts advocating or pushing for regime change, be it Iraq or Libya or
Syria, we need to be sure that we have something we think that's better to go
in its place and we are prepared to do the expensive process of putting there.
If not,
we had better start thinking twice before we make regime change the default
option for American foreign policy.
